Thursday, September 27, 2012

Grub Club: Yang Ju Gol

So blogspot went and did something stupid. They just couldn't leave well enough alone, nevermind the fact that I was completely okay with the old format. I get really tired of technologies like this changing on me, and as we all know, my opinion is what really counts. Right? Right????

Anyways, now that I've gotten my rant out of the way, I decided this Sunday past while sipping herbal tea at a friendly neighborhood wine tasting (yes, I do like to be a rebel...does it make it any better that it was a black currant tea and was just about the same color as the wine???) that since a group of us were going out for dinner every week, anyways, that I would start writing midweek about these dinner excursions. This week we decided to go out for Korean - one of us actually IS Korean, and two of us have lived there, and we started talking about the food during the wine tasting and decided to go. This may come as a shock, but I've only eaten Korean once since I got here, at Fire King, my kyobo predecessor's favorite; "and it was good." However, a couple of us had errands to run near the circus, so we decided to eat at one of the Korean restaurants on Seoul Street, Yang Ju Gol (our music teacher mentioned it to me earlier this week). We all decided the food wasn't bad - I had the kimchi jjigae, which was a little thicker than I like mine, but pretty tasty, and Bart said the kimbap was the best he's found here. They also serve barley tea with the meal, rather than just plain water (or nothing at all), so that was nice.

The thing that really made me happy, though, was the dubu (tofu). Pictured above is the dubu kimchi, which was okay but a little more sour than it should have been. But the real treat was the fried, marinated dubu that was one of the pancheon (bottomless side dishes) they were serving last night. It's my favorite, and we had them refill it about four times. The others were pretty good too; only the eggplant didn't get devoured. It was not a bad restaurant, but a little lacking in ambience (the bare lightbulbs and incessant drilling noise kinda killed the mood). And I found it to be a little on the pricey side - Bart's kimbap was 4000 tugrugs (about $2.85) and my kimchi jjigae was twice that. Of course, compared to a lot of the meals I eat out here, this is not all that bad, but it makes me cringe to consider how much those cost back in Korea. All in all, I might eat there again, but I can't come up with a scenario when I might do so - there are other restaurants I prefer in that area and if I want Korean, I'd more likely go to Fire King, or Bart's fave, Gung.